The story of Ushahidi starts with the 2007 Presidential Elections in Kenya. Mwai Kibaki was running for reelection against Raila Odinga. There was strong evidence that Odinga was the preferred candidate and that he was going to win. However, in a controversial move Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner. Kibaki was accused of electoral manipulation and riots broke out through out the country.

Following the announcement all live broadcasts where shut down by the Ministry of Security, casting a veil over the incident and leaving the people suffering and disoriented. It was this action that lead to the birth of Ushahidi. Ushahidi was an independent effort to aimed to gather reports for eyewitness sources and place it in google maps. It allowed for people to get around the mainstream media blackout and find out the scope and details of the violence.

Ushahidi means testimony or witness in Swahili .The way it works is that it gathers reports sent by civilian ”journalists” through SMS, MMS, or email. This is then filtered by Ushahidi personnel and put on a map. The Ushahidi organization was been active in a few other incidences. During the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Patrick Meier, one the key people behind Ushahidi gathered a group of people to map the thousands of reports being sent to them from the disaster areas. Their map was used by rescue teams and helped save hundreds of lives. They were also active during the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic, they traced the outbreak and spread of the virus.

Ushahidi is also a downloadable software that can be used by a number of different groups. As a result of this it has been used for several journalistic purposes around the world. It was used to trace the 2009 election in India. With India being the largest democracy in the world it was important to be able to keep track over the election on both a national and local scale to prevent misconduct. As opposed to the Kenya elections, India was actually able to use Ushahidi to make sure such incidents would not happen. The software has also been used by Al Jazeera to report violence on the Gaza Strip. Here we an case of a traditional media organization using new media tools to improve their reporting capabilities.

Ushahidi has several benefits over traditional media tools. Whereas it can be dangerous and expensive to send a lot of on-location journalists around the world to report different events, Ushahidi makes it possible to let the people in the news story report directly to the organisation. Traditional journalists are also limited with time and space, they can’t be everywhere all the time but Ushahidi provides a fast and efficient method of reporting stories that spans over a large area and a long duration of time. Finally it provides a level a transparency, being able to show thousands of perspectives that traditional media is unable to provide.

WikiLeaks stands for a somewhat appealing but often scary ideal. That the public has a right to all government affairs to make democracy more transparent. The scary part is when this information can endanger the lives of the people involved which highlights a conflict between freedom, rights, and security.

Founded by Julian Assange and currently based around different European countries, mainly Sweden, WikiLeaks has released millions of sensitive documents mainly concerning governments and large corporations. It is based around volunteers providing the documents through an anonymous drop box which WikiLeaks then decides to share with new organisations. This so that the providers of the information is protected against persecution.

The leaking of military documents from War in Iraq caused a major worldwide controversy. With over 400.000 documents released that exposes war crimes by American troops. The most famous example is the video Collateral Murder – Iraq which shows American helicopters firing on civilians. While I believe that people have the right to this information it did have major repercussions in terms of endangering soldiers and and the Iraqi people.

It was condemned by Iraqi government officials, including the Prime Minister, who said that it would only cause more hatred and destruction in the country. It has also led several people claiming the WikiLeaks essentially declared war on America.

This continuing quest to release all kinds of classified to the public has led the security of individuals being compromised. The story of Bradley Manning is a great example of this. Bradley Manning was the main contributor of the released information. After being exposed to the U.S. military, Bradley has been in military custody since July 2010 and has not faced any trial since.

While this is can be viewed as a major violation of human rights it has also brought up another discussion. Several reports claim that Manning was mentally unstable and was never fit to serve in the war. This also reflect how the war led to the requirements for enlisting and serving in the Army has been significantly looser in the recent years. A discussion around who is able to serve in any given war seems like an important topic that might deserve more attention.

My opinion of WikiLeaks is ultimately mixed. I do support the idea that government dealings should be transparent but perhaps to a certain degree. While war crimes are inexusable, a government does have the responisiblty to ensure the safety of its citizens and troops and also to work towards peace efforts rather than causing more violence and destruction.

I also found it interesting in the WikiRebels documentary when Daniel Domscheit-Berg talks about leaving WikiLeaks due a conflict of beliefs. He talks about how Assange has too much control over the organization and that how he himself lacks transparency.

”If you preach transparency to everyone else you have to be transparent” – Daniel Domscheit-Berg

It baffels me how a senator in the 21st century can have viewpoints that implies a support for segregation policies. In any case, It probably wasn’t too smart for Trent Lott to express such opinions even if it were unconventional methods of news reporting that brough down the Mississippi senator.

“I think there is something to the [notion] of pack journalism…of individuals believing that if something is noteworthy, … everyone will get it… If they didn’t all get it, then it couldn’t possibly be a newsworthy item.” – Ed O’Keefe

So at former Senator Strom Thurmond’s retirement, and 100th birthday party, Lott made the following statement: ”I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.” (video). The crowds cheered and reporters thought nothing special of it.

“This is news,” O’Keefe, ”off-air” reporter, said to himself. O’Keefe knew about Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign in 1948 on segregationist platform and his strong opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He figured this was a huge scoop since being branded a racist is not something a powerful man in politics such as Trent Lott would want.

ABC, however, did not seem to agree that what O’Keefe had pointed out was a worthy news story. The network need reactions that could be aired alongside the statement but people barely seem to have noticed that he said anything at all. Contempt which the attitudes of his coworkers he posted the story on the blog section of ABC’s website; The Note. In less than a week the story broke into the mainstream news media. This eventually put so much pressure on Lott that he was forced to resign his position as senator. Interestingly enough, Lott was reelected as senator in 2006, although he retired a year later.

This really shows how the internet allows for the inclusion of the stories that go unnoticed by the mainstram media and how blogs can provide a critical view on some of the shortcomings of mainstream journalists.In blogger Jolie O’Dell’s article she writes about some of the differences between a blogger and a journalist. For, example a blogger has the luxury of being able to provide opinion to their material and do not have any obligtions to their sources. While this might be seen as negative attributes it can provide an indefinate amount of different viewpoints which can help shape our view on the bigger picture.

Oh, a little fun-fact about Thurmond to end the week; when he was 22 he had a secret affair with a black maid of 16 who gave birth to a daughter. Interesting to think about how this affected his political career.

– Steinar Engelsen